The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools

by Bill Bigelow in CommonDreams.  published on Thursday, March 17, 2016 by Zinn Education Project

To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch…

To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants Hut)

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

© 2015 Zinn Education Project


British army creates team of Facebook warriors

Soldiers familiar with social media sought for 77th Brigade, which will be responsible for ‘non-lethal warfare’

A British soldier looks at an Iraqi colleague's mobile phone during a joint patrol. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

A British soldier looks at an Iraqi colleague's mobile phone during a joint patrol. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.

The 77th Brigade, to be based in Hermitage, near Newbury, in Berkshire, will be about 1,500-strong and formed of units drawn from across the army. It will formally come into being in April.

The brigade will be responsible for what is described as non-lethal warfare. Both the Israeli and US army already engage heavily in psychological operations.

Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.

The 77th will include regulars and reservists and recruitment will begin in the spring. Soldiers with journalism skills and familiarity with social media are among those being sought.

An army spokesman said: “77th Brigade is being created to draw together a host of existing and developing capabilities essential to meet the challenges of modern conflict and warfare. It recognises that the actions of others in a modern battlefield can be affected in ways that are not necessarily violent.”

The move is partly a result of experience in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. It can also be seen as a response to events of the last year that include Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in particular Crimea, and Islamic State’s (Isis) takeover of large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

Nato has so far been unable to find a counter to what the US and UK claim is Russia creating unrest by sending in regular troops disguised as local militia, allowing president Vladimir Putin to deny responsibility.Isis has proved adept at exploiting social media to attract fighters from around the world.

The Israel Defence Forces have pioneered state military engagement with social media, with dedicated teams operating since Operation Cast Lead, its war in Gaza in 2008-9. The IDF is active on 30 platforms – including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram – in six languages. “It enables us to engage with an audience we otherwise wouldn’t reach,” said an Israeli army spokesman.

It has been approached by several western countries, keen to learn from its expertise.

During last summer’s war in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, the IDF and Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, tweeted prolifically, sometimes engaging directly with one another.

The new brigade is being named the 77th in tribute to the Chindits, the British guerrilla force led by Maj Gen Orde Wingate against the Japanese in Burma during the second world war. Wingate adopted unorthodox and controversial tactics that achieved successes completely disproportionate to the size of his forces, sending teams deep into Japanese-held territory, creating uncertainty in the Japanese high command and forcing it to alter its strategic plans.

In a nod to the Chindits, members of the 77th Brigade will have arm badges showing a mythical Burmese creature.

The aim is that the new force will prove as flexible as the Chindits in the face of the dizzying array of challenges being thrown up in the early part of this century.

The creation of 77th Brigade comes as the commander of Nato special operations headquarters, Lt Gen Marshall Webb, speaking in Washington this week, expressed concern about Russia and about Isis.

“Special operations headquarters is uniquely placed to address this,” he said. “We tend to take an indirect approach. We can engage without being escalatory or aggressive. We tend to view things from an oblique angle, and we absolutely acknowledge that trust, information-sharing and interagency collaboration is crucial.”

Article The Guardian Jan, 2016


Sinn Fein recruiting activists for cyber combat

By James Quigley

"The internet and social media are transforming politics around the world and here in Ireland.  Never before has there been so many ways that you can help influence and make change happen through this global online community we live in."  (link below)

So says Sinn Fein's 'Online Supporters' (SFOS) web page.  It's proclamation and intent,  accompanied with Twitter ads,  seems overtly and blatantly obvious.  It is a recruitment campaign for cyber warriors to be part of the 'Digital Rising'.  

We know enough already about Sinn Fein's online scrutiny, abuse and bullying and we know that the practice is all too prevalent.  You would think that after all the evidence of this terrible phenomenon , Sinn Fein might apologise and in so doing stamp out the practice.  Unfortunately they haven't and instead by the looks of it they intend to intensify it. 

Wouldn't it be interesting to see inside the online activist's instruction manual?

Sinn Fein recruitment centre for online activists  - here at www.sinnfein.ie/sfos

Sinn Fein recruitment centre for online activists  - here at www.sinnfein.ie/sfos

 

Sinn Fein's drive for cyber watchdogs

Sinn Fein's latest advertisements and recruitment drive for online activists is overtly militaristic.  It is a command to action.  It is aggressive.  The above ad is a take on the iconic 1914 Lord Kitchener's First World War recruitment poster 'I Want You',  a macho image symbolising authoritarianism and militarism.  It is an order, a call to arms.   Interestingly the colour scheme of red on yellow is a warning signal in the animal world (aposematism).

Sinn Fein's command on their web page is  "Anois an t-am le gníomhú!  Now is that time to act!" .  And on the pages logo the symbolism is, in place of an armalite each activist is equipped with a mobile phone.

 

Should we be worried of this 'Digital Rising'

Paul@pauldelaney, March 2016, put up a warning on Twitter pointing out that " Everyone needs to be aware that Sinn Fein are planning an online onslaught that will troll accounts,  bullying & intimidating".
 

What on earth is Digital Rising?'

The journal.ie  said on Sept 2015  "Party supporters are also among the most active on social media.  Although a recent study found that it's supporters are less likely to use Twitter than other party supporters.  But Sinn Féin has also faced criticism for having so-called ‘keyboard warriors’ who have attacked abuse victim Máiria Cahill online.
 

Mairia Cahill's armchair Provo trolls sink to sickest depths

Belfast Telegraph wrote on March 2016 "Internet attacks on Mairia Cahill are nothing new, of course. They started up almost as soon as the original Spotlight programme detailing her alleged abuse by a suspected IRA man was broadcast back in October last year. Since then the news agenda has moved on. But the trolls haven't."
 

 The trolling of Ann Travers

sluggerotoole.com   on Nov 2014 asked " What do you think motivates people to troll you on Twitter?


Ann Travers;  Wow! Big question! I really don’t have any idea, however I guess it’s because I question and support others who question. I also guess it’s because my Dad was a Judge and my sister was murdered by the IRA. they see me as “fair game”.
 

A Critique - Donegal a microcosm of the malaise affecting Rigt2Change Ireland

Buncrana Together   on Nov 2015 Buncrana Together published an article about experiences of the control Sinn Fein had on the Right2Water/Right2Change movement and tried to show how they manipulated the campaign for it's own ends.  This end being Dáil Éireann

Sinn Fein/Right2Change strategy was one of 'controlled opposition'.  The party controlled, led and used the public to further their own ends.  It used main stream and social media in a well honed maneuver to push their agenda and attacked anyone who dared question.   Many good community campaigners fell victim to abuse and intimidation.     In the end Sinn Fein was for all intents and purposes Right2Change and more or less controlled the agenda.  If you questioned Sinn Fein/Right2change you were abused, isolated and ostracised.

 

Marginalisation, Isolation a Sinn Fein well honed tactic

Gerry Adams                 Sinn Fein President

Gerry Adams                 Sinn Fein President

The Belfast leader had once confided to a colleague on the Army Council the tactical approach he favored when going about the destruction and removal of political enemies, and it was this line of attack that he adopted to remove the Southern veterans:  " 'You don't confront people,'  he would say.   'You isolate and marginalize them and then get rid of them.'  I often heard him say that," the figure recalled.   page 178 'A Secret History of the IRA'  by Ed Moloney (referring to Gerry Adams)

 

Why should we be worried

'Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognises no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible' wikipedia.  

Not far away from  Sinn Fein's obsession with control and power by the party.  This domination is a  quest  by the party for power and the notion of online activism and Sinn Fein's documented track record in this field is akin to the control of the public's thoughts and feelings.  

Even the dogs in the street know how Gerry Adams and his closest advisors have control over Sinn Fein.  It is not surprising, after all,  he has been it's president since the 1980's and he has been associated with secretive organisations including the IRA in the longest, intensive period of military rebellion against British occupation of Northern Ireland.   

Given the history of secretive, clandestine operations of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein's political manoeuvring and what has been recently revealed about their nefarious activities including the use of the internet to bully, abuse and attack, we may well be right to take note.  

The now well chronicled  facts of Sinn Fein's  online cyber activities and its call to arms  reminds one of the former East German secret police, the Stasi,  " whose main task was spying on the population, mainly through a vast network of citizens turned informants and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents." wikipedia